Miller reached for the tactical earpiece tucked into his ear, pressing it firmly. He listened for three seconds, his expression shifting from anger to a cold, calcified dread. He turned his head slowly, looking past the armored vehicles toward the dark, gaping doorways of the abandoned warehouse looming over them.
"They didn't just route you here to stop you," Terrence said softly. "They routed you here because this is where the blind spot is."
Before Miller could respond, a flat, dry crack echoed through the courtyard.
It wasn't the loud, booming explosion of a military rifle, but rather the precise, suppressed pop of a high-caliber round striking heavy metal. A fraction of a second later, the front left tire of the presidential limousine buckled, the reinforced Kevlar sidewall tearing open with a sharp, hissing burst of pressurized air.
"SNIPER!" Miller screamed, diving toward the rear of the nearest SUV. "COVER THE PRIMARY! COVER THE PRIMARY!"
The courtyard instantly erupted into controlled chaos. Secret Service agents formed a human wall around the central limousine, their bodies pressed together as they forced the rear passenger door open, attempting to slide the package into the secondary armored vehicle.
Marcus pulled his service weapon, dropping behind the engine block of his patrol car. He looked up toward the third story of the brick factory. A thin wisp of grey smoke was drifting out of a broken window casing near the roofline.
"It’s not a sniper," Terrence said, crouching right next to Marcus behind the front wheel. He was holding his portable scanner high, watching the frequency bars spike wildly. "Look at the angle of the hit. That shot came from inside the building, at ground level."
"Why shoot the tire?" Marcus asked, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. "The Beast has run-flat tires. It can drive on rims for twenty miles."
"Because they don't want to stop the car," Terrence said, pointing toward the heavy rusted iron gate at the end of the alleyway. "They want us to think we're taking fire so we do exactly what we’re trained to do in an ambush: breach the gate and break out."
Marcus looked at the gate. Beyond the heavy chain, the gravel road curved around the back of the facility toward a narrow, single-lane concrete bridge that crossed a muddy creek.
"What's on that bridge?" Marcus whispered.
Terrence checked his screen, his face turning the color of ash. "Three hundred pounds of industrial demolition charges. If that convoy hits that bridge, the whole thing goes into the water, and there won't be a single survivor to explain what happened."
Marcus turned his head, looking back at Special Agent Miller, who was currently shouting orders into his dead radio while waving two agents forward with a heavy hydraulic breaching tool to cut the chain on the gate.
"Miller! Stop!" Marcus yelled, standing up over the hood of his cruiser. "Don't cut that gate!"
Miller didn't even look at him. "Get down, county! We're clearing an exit path!"
"It's a trap!" Marcus screamed, taking two strides away from the safety of his vehicle.
A second suppressed round snapped through the humid air. Marcus felt a sudden, ice-cold pull at the shoulder of his uniform shirt as the bullet passed through the fabric, striking the windshield of his patrol car behind him with a webbed spray of shattered glass.
Marcus collapsed backward onto the gravel, his shoulder burning where the hot lead had grazed his skin. Terrence grabbed him by the vest, dragging him hard behind the rear tire of the cruiser as a barrage of automated, low-caliber fire began to rake across the gravel court, bouncing off the heavy steel doors of the armored SUVs.
"They're driving us toward the gate," Terrence panted, pulling a small, black semi-automatic pistol from a hidden holster inside his waistband—a weapon he had kept concealed even while Marcus had him in handcuffs. "They aren't trying to hit the agents. They're pinning us down until Miller gets that chain cut."
Marcus clutched his shoulder, feeling the warm stickiness of blood soaking into his shirt. The pain was sharp, but the surge of adrenaline drowned it out almost instantly. He looked at Terrence, then at his own patrol car.
The cruiser's radio was still dead, but the car’s secondary computer system—the Mobile Data Terminal mounted on the center stack—was still powered on. The screen was flickering with a connection error, trying desperately to ping the county network.
"The MDT," Marcus gasped, pointing inside the open driver's door. "It uses a direct digital satellite link for license plate recognition. It doesn't run on the same frequency as the voice radios."
Terrence looked at the terminal, his eyes lighting up. "Can it send a raw data packet?"
"If I log into the state emergency override," Marcus said, pulling himself up onto his knees despite the burning pain in his arm. "It sends an automatic GPS ping to the regional dispatch office every sixty seconds. But it has to be manually triggered from the keyboard."
"Do it," Terrence said, raising his hand over the trunk of the car and firing three rapid shots toward the broken window on the third floor of the brickworks, forcing the shooter to pull back into the shadows. "Do it now!"
Marcus reached up, his fingers slippery with sweat and dirt, and grabbed the keyboard attached to the cruiser's dash. He slammed his palm against the function keys, bringing up the dark blue interface of the Georgia Crime Information Center network.
He didn't type a license plate. He didn't type a name.
He entered the administrative override code that every county deputy was required to memorize but prayed they would never have to use: CODE RED - OFFICER DOWN - LOCATION UNK - AUTOMATED TRACKING ON.
He hit the ENTER key.
On the screen, a small red indicator box began to pulse: TRANSMITTING... TRANSMITTING...
Then the screen froze. The red indicator light stopped blinking, turning a solid, sickly yellow.
TRANSMISSION FAILED: LOCAL JAMMING DETECTED.
Terrence looked down at the screen, his mouth tightening into a thin, hard line. "The jammer in my car... it's strong enough to block the satellite uplink from down here in the ravine. We’re too low."
Marcus looked from the frozen terminal to the top of the old brick kiln tower—a seventy-foot masonry chimney that rose high above the surrounding pine trees, piercing the blue sky like a jagged red finger.
"If we can get a booster cable up to that tower," Marcus said, looking at the heavy-duty auxiliary radio cable coiled in the trunk of his patrol car, "we can bypass the local interference and hit the repeater on the mountain twenty miles north."
Terrence looked up at the chimney, then down at the bloody tear in Marcus's shoulder. "You can't climb that tower, Deputy. Not with that arm."
"Then you take the cable," Marcus said, reaching into his trunk and ripping the thick black wire away from its mounting bracket. "And I'll make sure Miller doesn't drive that motorcade through that gate."
Marcus didn't wait for Terrence to answer. He grabbed his service shotgun from the rack between the front seats, racked a heavy 12-gauge slug into the chamber, and stepped out into the open courtyard, exposing himself entirely to the shooter hidden in the shadows above.
"Miller!" Marcus roared over the sound of crackling gunfire. "LOOK AT ME!"
Special Agent Miller turned just as the hydraulic cutter snapped the last link of the heavy steel chain on the iron gate. The two agents at the front began pushing the heavy rusted doors open, revealing the clear gravel road leading toward the narrow concrete bridge.
Marcus didn't shoot at the factory. He aimed his shotgun directly at the tires of the secondary armored SUV—the vehicle currently leading the motorcade's egress line.
BOOM.
The heavy lead slug shattered the front wheel assembly of the SUV, dropping the three-ton vehicle down onto its frame with a metallic crunch that echoed across the brick yard.
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" Miller screamed, drawing his own weapon and aiming it straight at Marcus's chest. "HE'S COMPROMISED! TAKE HIM DOWN!"
Three Secret Service agents advanced on Marcus, their weapons raised, their eyes wide with confusion and fury.
"DON'T MOVE THAT CAR!" Marcus shouted, dropping the empty shotgun onto the gravel and holding his hands high in the air, blood running freely down his left arm. "THE BRIDGE IS WIRED! THE ENTIRE EXIT IS A DEMOLITION ZONE!"
Miller hesitated, his finger hovering over the trigger of his pistol. He looked from Marcus's bleeding shoulder to the open gate, then back to the dark line of trees beyond the river.